Respite for hares as officials back a close season for hunting

Times

01-06-2025

Brown hares could finally have a respite from year-round shooting after the government said it supported ambitions to introduce a close season.
Unlike other game such as deer and pheasants, brown hares — the numbers of which have declined by more than 80 per cent over the past century — can be hunted all year.
Last week, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said England and Wales 'stand out as being among the few European countries not to have a close season,' adding that it had failed 'to give it the protection we should'.
It said it would look for 'a suitable primary legislative vehicle to deliver this close season'.
Chloe Dalton, the former Foreign Office adviser who wrote the acclaimed non-fiction book Raising Hare, which is based on her experiences living with the animals in her rural home, said the absence of a close season meant hunters turned their attention to brown hares when all other game species were protected.
'The hare you can shoot at any time and commonly, because of the prohibition on shooting these other animals, such as pheasant, which you can't shoot from February 1, it is a good time for business reasons to shoot hares in February.
'So the peak shooting season for hares coincides with their breeding season, during which period most female hares are either lactating or pregnant or both. If you shoot a mother hare, her young [leverets] starve to death. It is an animal welfare issue,' she told the Hay Festival.
'It is a core principle of conservation that you don't kill an animal when it is breeding,' Dalton added.
• Chloe Dalton: My father read Joseph Conrad to us at the kitchen table
Brown hares are one of Britain's most extraordinary — and previously revered — species. In his account of the Gallic Wars 2,000 years ago, Julius Caesar said native Britons refused to eat the animal because it was sacred.
Dalton's book outlines how brown hares are able to carry two litters of leverets simultaneously, in a process known as superfetation. They can move at 37 of their own body lengths per second, while a cheetah, the fastest land animal, can move at 23 of its body lengths per second.
Dalton said: 'I think it is straightforward. We should grant to hares the same protection that we give to every other game species. Scotland already has, and most of Europe. So what happens is that they [European hunters] come over to [England and Wales] to do it.'
A petition calling upon the government to protect hares and leverets from shooting during the breeding season from February 1 to September 30 has now been signed by over 20,000 people.
According to the Hare Preservation Trust, there were about four million brown hares in Britain in the late 1800s. It said numbers had declined by more than 80 per cent during the past century — which it said was at least in part also due to the intensification of agriculture — and has also stated that in parts of Britain, such as the southwest, 'the brown hare is almost a rarity and may even be locally extinct'.
Dalton, who was being interviewed at the Hay Festival by Lord Hague of Richmond, her former boss, who also supports the introduction of a close season, said the case should be made that the hare was 'an iconic national animal'.
'There is something about the quietly persistent, unassuming hare that speaks to who we are in this country,' Dalton said. 'I hope we can reverse these years of inattention.'